Modelling at a detailed, multi-dimensional level is crucial for the Branch finance team to understand their growth levers. While playing a key role in their country-wide expansion plans, the Branch finance team reached the limits of spreadsheet-based planning:

• Complex multi-dimensional modelling — With four product offerings, an expansion from 5 to 50 states and a need to plan by product, geography, and acquisition channel, there was no chance that Excel could keep up with the level of dimensionality that the Branch team needed. This lack of model flexibility, increased workbook loading times, and endless manual transformations slowed the finance team to the point of paralysis.
• Forecast accuracy — As a venture-backed company, managing cash runway is crucial for Branch. Having constantly changing requirements (new products, new territories), the broken cell references and the lack of audit trail made the team lose confidence in the quality and accuracy of their models.
• Delivering timely insights — The size and manual nature of each model made communicating results to decision-makers virtually impossible. In their email instructions, each executive was told to close every application on their computer in order to see their models. Insights needed to be shared more efficiently and with more frequency —  something needed to change.